Blog

Outkast’s Legendary Album “Aquemini” Turns 20.

School for many was underway, the fall air begin to make its appearance, football season had already cranked back up, and in the midst of it all, the tag team legends of the south drop their third studio album we have grown to love 20 years later. If I was asked what was I doing twenty years ago, the only thing I probably could remember is playing on my high school’s football team and being in the chorus. Nevertheless, this date should come across as having great significance because it was a full 25 months since the duo dropped the follow up to a classic in its own right, ATLiens.

Many thought Andre “Big Boi” Patton and Andre “3000 Benjamin could not do better than the previous phenomenon. They did, and in a big way. As genres are concerned, classical music has a category that consists of Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, etc. This is essentially classical music. This timeless album stands the test of time and will continue to do so. Even with the lead single of “Rosa Parks” garnering controversy, the album went on to have commercial success. So much so, not only did it go on to be certified double platinum within a year, it went on to be included in Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Aquemini had everything you would want in an album: supreme lyricism, stratospheric story telling, and overall soulful sound that could compete against any album in the rap/hip hop genre, at any point of time in hip hop history. On social media, there are those shared posts where if there was a gun to your head, you had to recite a song you know word for word without any mistakes to live. For me that song is Skew It On A Bar-B. Mainly because I was a Wu-Tang fan as well, and Raekwon was a guest feature on the record. Because of the generational gaps with hip hop fans today, the musical tastes are widely different between the older and younger hip hop fans, but it would be one of the few albums since the birth of hip hop that could widely be appreciated across all generations.